1. Field of the Invention
A team arm wrestling machine is disclosed whereby multiple persons may join together in competition through simultaneous participation in use of the machine. The machine has two or more pairs of opposed operating levers mounted on shafts which are linked together to permit the arm wrestlers to participate as a team.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Competitions testing the strength of contestants have been known and enjoyed for many years. Some, such as wrestling, require a degree of supervision and equipment and are staged between individual contestants. Others, such as tug-of-war require minimal equipment and permit contestants to participate as a team.
Arm wrestling has long been popular as a sport where two individual contestants face each other across a table in a contest of strength. Conventionally, the contestants place their elbows on a table and grasp hands. At the beginning of the contest, their forearms are in a generally upright position, and at the signal to begin, each contestant attempts to pin the back of the opponent's arm against the table. While this competition is quite simple, it has certain inherent weaknesses in that opponents' arms may be of varying length and the opponents have a tendency to raise the elbow from the table to achieve greater leverage.
In order to combat these deficiencies, a number of arm wrestling machines have been developed or proposed, such as the machine for arm wrestling disclosed in our U.S. Pat. No. 4,463,949. However, all of these machines have focused on ways to improve the competition by eliminating various advantages in technique or leverage. None have attempted to alter the basic one-on-one character of the competition to provide a means for additional competitors to simultaneously participate as a team.